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Apple Water, Iced
Boil six large juicy apples cored and quartered, until they can be pulped through a sieve, when add to the strained juice a quart of lemon-water, and freeze in the usual way. The preserving-pan containing the apples should be placed far enough from the fire to prevent them from being burnt or losing their nice colour. Time to freeze the liquid, about twenty-five minutes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for three pints.
A water ice rather than a drink, though the line between the two was thin in Victorian cookery. Everything hinges on keeping the apple pulp pale, which is why the pan sits away from the fire.
- Lemon-waterIn Cassell's this appears to mean a sweetened lemonade (water, lemon juice and sugar) rather than plain acidulated water. Something on the order of the juice of three or four lemons and 4-6 oz sugar to the quart, tasted so the mixture is distinctly sweeter than you want the finished ice, since freezing mutes sweetness.
- Imperial measuresA quart here is the imperial quart, 40 fl oz or about 5 US cups. The stated yield of three pints is likewise imperial, about 7 US cups.
- Apples"Large juicy apples" means culinary apples that break down readily -- Bramley, or any tart cooker. Dessert apples hold their shape and will not pulp through a sieve without a fight.
- The pan and the colourA preserving-pan was a wide, shallow, usually untinned copper or brass pan. Use a heavy stainless or enamelled saucepan with a lid, a splash of water, and low heat; the instruction to keep it from the fire is about avoiding both scorching and the grey-brown tinge that fast cooking gives apple. A little of the lemon juice added to the apples as they cook helps hold the colour.
- SievingPush the hot pulp through a fine sieve rather than blitzing it. A blender aerates and leaves flecks of skin, and the finished ice should be smooth and translucent.
- "Freeze in the usual way"The original assumes a pewter or zinc freezing pot packed in a pail of crushed ice and coarse salt, worked with a spatula. In an ice-cream machine the twenty-five minutes still holds; without one, freeze in a shallow tray and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita texture.
- Chill before churningNothing in the original says to cool the mixture, but the pulp must be cold before it goes into any freezer, machine or ice pail, or it will simply melt the ice around it.
- Cost8d is eightpence in pre-decimal currency, a figure Cassell's gives for household budgeting; it suggests apples and lemons were cheap.
Apple water belongs to the long English tradition of "invalid cookery" -- barley water, toast water, lemon water, rice water -- thin, mildly acid drinks prescribed for the feverish and given a place in almost every nineteenth-century household manual. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s and reissued in enlarged editions for decades, does what its period liked doing and promotes the sickroom drink into a dinner ice by freezing it. That it could do so at all reflects the mid-Victorian ice trade: cheap block ice shipped from Norway and North America, packed in urban ice wells, and worked at home with a pail, a quantity of coarse salt and a strong arm. The phrase "freeze in the usual way" is the giveaway that by this date the technique needed no explaining.